Palaeoanthropology Lab, Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia.
Geoarchaeology and Archaeometry Research Group, Southern Cross Geoscience, Southern Cross University, Lismore, New South Wales, Australia.
Evol Anthropol. 2024 Apr;33(2):e22018. doi: 10.1002/evan.22018. Epub 2024 Jan 13.
An uncritical reliance on the phylogenetic species concept has led paleoanthropologists to become increasingly typological in their delimitation of new species in the hominin fossil record. As a practical matter, this approach identifies species as diagnosably distinct groups of fossils that share a unique suite of morphological characters but, ontologically, a species is a metapopulation lineage segment that extends from initial divergence to eventual extinction or subsequent speciation. Working from first principles of species concept theory, it is clear that a reliance on morphological diagnosabilty will systematically overestimate species diversity in the fossil record; because morphology can evolve within a lineage segment, it follows that early and late populations of the same species can be diagnosably distinct from each other. We suggest that a combination of morphology and chronology provides a more robust test of the single-species null hypothesis than morphology alone.
对系统发育物种概念的不加批判的依赖，导致古人类学家在人类化石记录中新物种的划界越来越具有类型学特征。实际上，这种方法将物种定义为可诊断的化石群，这些化石具有独特的形态特征组合，但从本体论的角度来看，物种是一个从最初的分化到最终的灭绝或随后的物种形成的种系谱系段。从物种概念理论的基本原则出发，很明显，对形态可诊断性的依赖将系统地高估化石记录中的物种多样性；因为形态可以在谱系段内进化，所以同一物种的早期和晚期种群彼此之间可能具有可诊断的区别。我们认为，形态和年代学的结合比单独的形态学提供了对单一物种零假设更有力的检验。
